Waymo -- a division of Google -- has been testing self-driving cars since 2009 and has driven them more than 2 billion miles. Last year, Waymo reported 13 accidents involving its fleet in the state of California, which requires companies testing autonomous vehicles to report any accidents. Most of the accidents were minor and weren't caused by Waymo's vehicles. But in February 2016, a Waymo test car struck a public bus near the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has criticised WhatsApp's use of encryption to protects its users' communications, in the wake of the Westminster terror attack. It has emerged that the attacker, Khalid Masood, sent a WhatsApp message moments before launching his assault, and Ms Rudd accused the Facebook-owned app of providing terrorists with a place to "hide". In the government's line of fire is end-to-end encryption, a security technique designed to keep users' data private, which Ms Rudd described as "completely unacceptable" while speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption to all of its messages in April 2016, enabling it by default on all conversations. "From now on when you and your contacts use the latest version of the app, every call you make, and every message, photo, video, file, and voice message you send, is end-to-end encrypted by default, including group chats," it said at the time.

Stephen Hawking has managed to air his concerns about Donald Trump, Brexit and the backlash against experts to an audience of hundreds in Hong Kong without travelling 6,000 miles to the country. The world-famous physicist appeared before crowds who cheered and took photos via hologram. The cosmologist and professor, who is 75, is the latest in a string of politicians and entertainers to use the technology which is making significant incursions into industries. Hawking made the speech and answered questions in the guise of a "HumaGram", a three-dimensional image which can only be viewed by those in special glasses. The Cambridge professor also spoke via a hologram at the Sydney Opera House in 2015.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used as an unbiased judge, for matters ranging from insurance to economic efficiency. But can it ever truly be unbiased? When Remy Descartes first wrote the phrase cogito ergo sum –'I think therefore I am'– in the 1600s, he could not have been aware of the philosophical questioning that would erupt with the onset of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 20th and 21st century. Every Google search, every video suggested on YouTube and every Siri recommendation is built on machine learning algorithms designed to learn everything about your online habits, in a bid to offer targeted content that you might like. Even outside of consumer-level decisions, AI and algorithms are increasingly being used to root out hidden meanings in billions of lines of genetic code, in the hope of finding a cure to a disease or building machines that can talk for themselves.

Blizzard is legendary for keeping old games alive, but it's going the extra mile this time around. The studio has unveiled StarCraft: Remastered, an overhaul that drags the 1998 real-time strategy game into the modern era. It's getting the obligatory fresh coat of paint, including higher-resolution graphics and improved audio. The team is also using this as an excuse to'fix' the game by adding content and features you take for granted. Multiplayer fans will see features that have been a staple of newer Blizzard titles, including "advanced" matchmaking, ladder play and social features.

Approximately half of adult Americans' photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals. About 80% of photos in the FBI's network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver's licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people. These are just some of the damning facts presented at last week's House oversight committee hearing, where politicians and privacy campaigners criticized the FBI and called for stricter regulation of facial recognition technology at a time when it's creeping into law enforcement and business. "Facial recognition technology is a powerful tool law enforcement can use to protect people, their property, our borders, and our nation," said committee chair Jason Chaffetz, adding that in the private sector it can be used to protect financial transactions and prevent fraud or identity theft.

In the recent presidential election, automation and robotics got a slight reprieve from the accusations that it has been the key driver in job losses in the United States. During the campaign, the conversation shifted, thanks largely to then-candidate Trump's masterful scapegoating of Mexico and China, while calling out trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership as clear and present threats to U.S. manufacturing. Indeed, the administration continues to downplay automation as a factor in the U.S. economy, because that explanation runs against the political policies it hopes to enact under the guise of improving the conditions of America's workforce. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissed the prospects of artificial intelligence and automation eroding the workforce. "I'm not worried at all" about robots displacing humans in the near future, he said, adding: "In fact I'm optimistic." But even as some politicians look to divert attention from the issue, public focus returned to the evils of automation. The New York Times ran a story titled "The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It's Automation," while the Associated Press explained "Why robots, not trade, are behind so many factory job losses."

The idea of a tax on robots was raised last May in a draft report to the European parliament prepared by MEP Mady Delvaux from the committee on legal affairs. Emphasising how robots could boost inequality, the report proposed that there might be a "need to introduce corporate reporting requirements on the extent and proportion of the contribution of robotics and AI to the economic results of a company for the purpose of taxation and social security contributions". The public reaction to Delvaux's proposal has been overwhelmingly negative, with the notable exception of Bill Gates, who endorsed it. But we should not dismiss the idea out of hand. In just the past year, we have seen the proliferation of devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo Dot (Alexa), which replace some aspects of household help. Likewise, the Delphi and nuTonomy driverless taxi services in Singapore have started to replace taxi drivers.

Can machines think?" asked Alan Turing, known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), in a seminal paper on the topic of computing machinery and intelligence in 1950. Turing did not coin the term'Artificial Intelligence' but his work laid the foundations for a new research area to be termed'Artificial Intelligence' by John McCarthy, one of the organizers of the 1956 conference held at Dartmouth College, UK to delve into the fundamental task of developing an electronic brain. However, by 1973, disappointed by the progress of work, funding dried up in the UK and USA and AI plunged into a long'winter'. In the 20th century, AI was an idea for the future. It needed much more computing power and a greater variety of digital data sources than was available at that time. Today, the picture has changed. Computing power has reached petaflops levels, distributed on the Cloud and accessible to personal devices like smartphones. As much as 90% of the existing data has been created in the last two years; 2.5 quintillion of data is generated per day from sensors, mobiles, online transactions and social media. The challenge is how to harness this huge data flow to return actionable information without storing this data for future analysis because the growth of storage capacity has long been surpassed by the growth of data volume and there is no possibility of the gap being covered. This is why AI has again gained prominence. Big Data Analytics enables the analysis of data as it streams and stores only the intelligence gathered for future reference. Big Data Analytics is one of the applications of Artificial Intelligence. Atanu Sinha, Director – India and SAARC, Hexagon Geospatial, says: "Big Data Analytics is more to do with past analysis and future trends based on which an organization can make informed decisions.

This week the World Government Summit took place in Dubai attracting considerable global interest. Though not immediately associated with excitement and anticipation, trends in government are receiving considerable attention. By 2020, 60 percent of the world's population will be living in cities, putting a huge strain on existing government operations. Increasingly it is clear that governments across the board have to overhaul their approach to be more streamlined, effective and dynamic. What had begun as a niche academic reference, "The future of government" is fast becoming a school in itself. With the development of cognitive technologies such as computer learning, natural language processing, robotics and speech recognition -- the need to build government capabilities to use such developments is clear.